| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All righty, folks. | ||
| Gavin Newsom is back and he says that he wants to see more trans kids. | ||
| Is that good for his 2028 hopes? | ||
| Plus, President Trump suffering some speed bumps on the economy and the Indiana GOP rejecting his plan for congressional redistricting first in less than two weeks on Christmas Day. | ||
| Episodes one and two of the Penn Dragon cycle rise of the Merlin begins streaming for Daily Wire plus all access members. | ||
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| So right now, Democrats are looking at 2028 and they see Republican vulnerability. | ||
| What they see is a 2024 election that while it was fairly solid as a win for Republicans in the Electoral College, was a pretty narrow win in the popular vote. | ||
| And they think that perhaps they can reverse the tides, that perhaps they can take the White House in 2028 with somebody like Gavin Newsom. | ||
| Well, what Democrats have been doing in order to shift away from their 2024 failing strategy is they've been taking the least popular parts of their agenda and they have been moving those to the back burner. | ||
| So DEI, you're hearing all about equity in the run-up to the 2024 election. | ||
| It was the centerpiece of the Joe Biden campaign in 2020. | ||
| It was again the centerpiece of the Kamala Harris campaign, the late breaking Kamala Harris campaign in 2024. | ||
| You do not hear Democrats talking about equity each and every day the way that they were before. | ||
| They instead are talking about, for example, affordability. | ||
| The same thing is true with regard to radical trans issues. | ||
| The politics on transgenderism are awful for Democrats. | ||
| The vast majority of Americans believe that boys are boys and girls are girls and boys cannot become girls and attempts to brainwash children into the idea that they are in fact members of the opposite sex or even could be members of the opposite sex is perverse. | ||
| That telling a young kid that you might have a girl brain and a boy body is not only Gnostic and scientifically nonsensical, it is very, very wrong to do that to children. | ||
| And that was the general perception among Americans and it drove huge numbers for President Trump. | ||
| The single most effective ad of the 2024 campaign was on this issue from the Trump campaign. | ||
| It suggested that Kamala was for they, them. | ||
| President Trump is for you. | ||
| And again, if you talked to people in minority communities that swiveled from Democrat to Republican, this was a major issue because the trans issue, well, of course, affecting a fairly small percentage of the population, went to root truths of our society. | ||
| Can you trust people who just tell you such a basic lie that boys can be girls? | ||
| And the answer is no. | ||
| And so Democrats have decided that they were going to put that on the back burner. | ||
| One of those Democrats was Gavin Newsom. | ||
| So a few months ago, Gavin Newsom was doing a podcast with the late Charlie Kirk in which Charlie was pressing Gavin Newsom on trans politics. | ||
| And Newsom admitted that boys should not be playing in girl sports. | ||
| And he admitted that there was unfairness to all of that. | ||
| Well, now Gavin Newsom, believing that he is the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination, is being asked questions by members of the Democratic base. | ||
| And so he did a podcast with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, in which he was asked about his take on trans politics. | ||
| And now that Newsom believes that he has to win primaries in the Democratic Party, as he prepares for that 2028 run, he will be forced to answer questions about things like, where is he on transgenderism, particularly with regard to minors? | ||
| So he ended up swiveling back into what is in fact a losing strategy for Democrats. | ||
| Here was the California governor proclaiming that he wants to see more trans kids. | ||
| Contradictions, bring it on. | ||
| Contradictions, but that I think I can explain. | ||
| Perhaps evolutions that we didn't get into trans sports. | ||
| That's an issue no one wants to hear about because 80% of people listening disagree with my position on this. | ||
| But it comes from my heart, not just my head. | ||
| It wasn't a political evolution. | ||
| The position being that I don't think it's I want to see trans kids. | ||
| I have a trans godson. | ||
| There's no governor to sign more pro-trans legislation than I have, and no one has been a stronger advocate for the LGBT two minutes. | ||
| But you have to accommodate the reality of those whose rights are being taken away as we advance the rights of the trans community in terms of the fairness of athletic competition. | ||
| And I just think that's not a bigoted position. | ||
| And it's an example of some of the things I've been saying about being judgmental, dismissing people, throwing that person out of the party. | ||
| I mean, you want to talk cancel culture. | ||
| I've lived it on that issue alone, despite a record of 30 years. | ||
| And people are willing to say, I'm done. | ||
| Friendships I lost on that position. | ||
| And that position, by the way, came to me two years prior, where I had to try to accommodate for a trans athlete and another athlete that were in the state finals and track and figure the field. | ||
| And they both dropped out because we couldn't figure out a way to make it fair. | ||
| And it was so unfair to both their families. | ||
| Broke my heart. | ||
| Okay, so that is Gavin Newsom trying to have every side of every issue. | ||
| But the key there is that he says he wants to see trans kids. | ||
| Okay, the normie position is that there is no such thing as a trans kid. | ||
| There are kids who may have gender dysphoria. | ||
| That is a different thing. | ||
| There is no such thing as a kid who is a boy in a girl's body or upon whom we should be performing hormonal therapies and surgeries that are utterly unscientific and permanently damaging to the human body. | ||
| So when Gavin Newsom says, I want to see trans kids, there's no governor that's done more pro-trans legislation than I have when he says that sort of stuff. | ||
| That creates a real awkwardness for the Democratic Party. | ||
| Well, this broke into the open because this led off a debate with Elon Musk. | ||
| All righty, coming up, Elon Musk fires back at Gavin Newsome and it turns into a real firefight first. | ||
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| Okay, Elon Musk commented on Gavin Newsom's post. | ||
| And then Gavin Newsom's press office replied, Correct. | ||
| We're sorry, your daughter hates you, Elon. | ||
| Which, by the way, is insane. | ||
| I mean, it's insane. | ||
| To get personal on these sorts of issues is really, really bad. | ||
| Like truly bad. | ||
| When I discuss these issues, I try not to get personal on these issues. | ||
| The reason I try not to get personal on these issues is because once you're into the emotional valence of somebody's family, you have a problem. | ||
| And I hate politics that eventually is just reduced to my feelings about members of my own family. | ||
| I remember a few years ago, this is a story I really haven't frequently told. | ||
| A few years ago, I spoke at the University of British Columbia up in Canada, and it was about this issue. | ||
| It was about the trans issue. | ||
| And a person got up who identified as trans. | ||
| It was a man who believed that he was a woman. | ||
| And he got up and he started asking a question and he started personalizing the question. | ||
| He started saying, well, you know, my family treats me as though I'm a girl. | ||
| And I said, you know, I would really appreciate if we could keep this on the level of the philosophical and the issue-based because your interpersonal relations, once we get into critiquing interpersonal relations, this is going to get very personal very quickly. | ||
| And this person kept insisting, no, you know, I know that I'm a woman because my family treats me as a woman. | ||
| And I kept saying, please, I don't want to talk about how your family treats you because that's about your family. | ||
| It's not about the broader issue, which is the question of public policy and how we ought to deal with these issues as a general society. | ||
| And the person wouldn't stop. | ||
| And so finally, I said, the reason that your family is saying to you that you are a woman and confirming you in your delusion is because they are afraid that you will do something bad to yourself, not because they actually believe that you are a woman. | ||
| They do not believe that you are a girl. | ||
| They know that you are not. | ||
| They are trying to humor you because they're afraid of what will happen if they do not. | ||
| And this person got extremely emotional and rushed out of the room. | ||
| Now, obviously, that was sort of a perfect YouTube clip. | ||
| The reason you've never seen that on YouTube is because I went to the organizers of the event. | ||
| This is in front of 2,000 people. | ||
| I went to the organizers of the event and I asked them to remove that from the tape because I knew that this person was going to be damaged by that tape that was going to hurt this person. | ||
| Not only that, I then found friends of the person and asked this person to come to breakfast the next morning to make sure this person was okay. | ||
| Okay, because when you merge the personal and the political in this way, it gets really ugly really quickly. | ||
| So Gavin Newsom's press office going after Elon Musk's child is truly ugly stuff, really, really ugly stuff. | ||
| So Elon Musk then tweeted back: I assume you're referring to my son Xavier, who has a tragic mental illness caused by the evil woke mind virus you push on vulnerable children. | ||
| I love Xavier very much and hope he recovers. | ||
| My daughters are Azure, Exa, she goes by Y, and Arcadia. | ||
| And they do indeed love me very much. | ||
| Now, the fact that Newsom's office went that low is really quite disgusting. | ||
| That's really quite terrible from Gavin Newsome. | ||
| And it just goes to show the Democrats are going to run headlong into their own radicalism on this issue. | ||
| Now, again, they might do what Abigail Spanberger did in Virginia. | ||
| They might try to avoid the issue altogether. | ||
| Gavin Newsom seems like he's trying to avoid the issue altogether. | ||
| But if he is dragged back into discussing this issue, and if Democrats keep making this a moral litmus test as to whether boys can be girls, especially minors, then they're going to be in for a world of hurt. | ||
| Instead, they would, of course, like to talk about the economy. | ||
| They'd like to talk about their new issue of affordability because they sense vulnerability there. | ||
| And this brings us to President Trump's ratings on the economy. | ||
| So, right now, President Trump's ratings on the economy are particularly weak. | ||
| He's down to something like 31% approval rating when it comes to his economic ratings, which, of course, makes Democrats incredibly happy. | ||
| And as we've been discussing all week long on this issue, it turns out that there is, in fact, a bifurcation between the performance of the stock market or the performance of the employment market, at least the data that we have, and Americans' feelings about that, much of which is indeed embedded because of inflation over the course of the last five years. | ||
| When people say that they want inflation to go down, they don't mean that they want inflation at a 2% rate. | ||
| They mean they want prices to actively go down. | ||
| And that sort of gap between what they want and what can actually be achieved is a very, very real gap. | ||
| Nonetheless, it is having consequences for President Trump. | ||
| The pollster, Kristen Soltis-Anderson, friend of the show, she has a piece in the New York Times talking about President Trump's poor approval numbers. | ||
| She says this: What's crucial to understand about Mr. Trump's poor approval numbers is that unlike during his last term in the White House, people now disapprove of him because of the economy, not in spite of it. | ||
| President Trump got a small bump recently as he paid more attention to the economy, at least in one poll. | ||
| His approval figure rose from 38% to 41% in a Reuters-Ipsos survey out this week. | ||
| But his overall rating remains low when it comes to the cost of living at 31%. | ||
| He's now traveling the country on an affordability messaging tour and can't help but revert to his insistence on his success against the evidence. | ||
| So, how ominous is this? | ||
| Well, says Kristen Soltis-Anderson, for one thing, we should view all of this in the context of the current political climate. | ||
| Job approval has typically been a strong signal of the country's political mood, with poor approval numbers often resulting in bad election outcomes. | ||
| But lower job approval numbers are arguably simply the norm these days. | ||
| Presidents don't get much of a honeymoon. | ||
| It's no longer commonplace for a president to begin with job approval around 70% and then end his term 30 or 40 points lower, as Jimmy Carter did today. | ||
| Job approval percentages instead tend to remain in a narrow band, with partisans largely dug in and unwilling to move. | ||
| Voters seem less eager to give a thumbs up to a president for whom they did not vote almost regardless of the circumstances. | ||
| So, a job approval of 42% might not seem like a five-alarm fire to President Trump, but affordability is sliding away from President Trump. | ||
| Only 15% of respondents said in a Fox News poll last month that they think that President Trump's economic policies have helped them personally. | ||
| So, it'll be interesting to see what sort of consequences this has. | ||
| President Trump yesterday acknowledged that his polling numbers were a bit of a problem. | ||
| And he said, quote, I inherited a mess from the Biden administration, the worst inflation in history, the highest prices our country has ever seen. | ||
| In other words, affordability just 13 months ago was a disaster for the American people, but now it's totally different. | ||
| Prices are coming down fast. | ||
| Energy, oil, and gasoline are hitting five-year lows. | ||
| The stock market today just hit an all-time high. | ||
| Tariffs are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars, and we are respected as a nation again. | ||
| When will I get credit for having created, with no inflation, perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country? | ||
| When will people understand what is happening? | ||
| When will polls reflect the greatness of America at this point in time and how bad it was just one year ago? | ||
| Again, I think that there is truth to that. | ||
| However, when the president goes out on the road and he talks about how you really don't need to buy toys for your kids because we need steel, Americans inherently hear a trade-off that they either don't want to make or feel they shouldn't have to make. | ||
| Caroline Lovett at the White House was asked about President Trump's comments on that matter yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Isn't it good look for him to be telling parents, oh, you kill, you should only buy, you know, two or three dollars for your kids when he's one of the wealthiest people in the country or even. | |
| Do you think the people in that room in Pennsylvania who the president was speaking to don't know the president's a billionaire? | ||
| I think that's a very well-established fact. | ||
| And actually, I think it's one of the many reasons they re-elected him back to this office because he's a businessman who understands the economy and knows how to fix it. | ||
| And he's doing it right now, just like he did in his first term. | ||
| So, by the way, agree with many of the things that President Trump is doing on the economy. | ||
| But when you tell the American people that the tariff regime, which does, in fact, in the short term, increase prices while lowering economic activity, when you tell them that it's bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars and then tell them also you're not going to be able to afford to buy your kid a second dollar for Christmas, that is not going to be a popular economic pitch. | ||
| I don't care who says it, Republican or Democrat. | ||
| And if President Trump is relying on another lowering of the interest rates in order to inject more liquidity into what is already a hot economy, he is right. | ||
| It's a hot economy. | ||
| We're running at 3% inflation or so. | ||
| We have a 4.4% unemployment rate. | ||
| And the stock market, Dow Jones, is going to break 50,000 under his administration. | ||
| That is a hot economy. | ||
| We don't actually need more liquidity. | ||
| We need fewer regulations and fewer barriers to entry. | ||
| The focus on the central bank seems to me at mistake. | ||
| Here's Caroline Lovitt on the interest rates. | ||
| I think the president has been quite clear about what he believes the Fed should be doing, which is lowering interest rates. | ||
| I know there was a quarter point reduction this past week, and the president was pleased to see that, but he thinks more should be done. | ||
| So, again, I disagree. | ||
| I think that the interest rates are probably where they need to be, and we need to let the economy settle just a little bit. | ||
| Some predictability would be good at this point. | ||
| However, the president's not great approval ratings on the economy. | ||
| Democrats are seeing an opening here, and they are pile driving him with regard to, again, the term that they use, affordability. | ||
| The nice thing about it is it's totally fungible, as we've discussed. | ||
| If you said inflation, then you'd have a statistical metric by which to measure success. | ||
| When you say affordability, that's a feeling. | ||
| And sometimes I feel things are affordable. | ||
| Sometimes I feel they aren't. | ||
| Very rarely do I feel things are affordable. | ||
| Very few people tend to feel that things are generally affordable. | ||
| That is particularly true when Democrats stack the deck, as they have with regard to Obamacare and health insurance subsidies. | ||
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| So Democrats have come up with a winning strategy with regard to Obamacare. | ||
| Create a program that is bound to fail. | ||
| And then when it fails, claim that Republicans are standing in the way of fixing it if they don't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into it. | ||
| That is, in fact, the plan. | ||
| By the way, the end point of that is what it always was, which is universal health care. | ||
| And if it continues to fail and continues to fail and continues to fail, then you take the vast majority of Americans who are not on public health insurance, who in fact have private insurance plans, and then you say the only way to fix the system is for the government to take it over wholesale. | ||
| At least Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Democrat, she at least is honest enough to admit this. | ||
| Here she was on the floor of the Senate yesterday saying that actually, no matter what we do with Obamacare, we need universal health care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We still need universal health care in America. | |
| We have needed it for a very long time. | ||
| It is what I've always been fighting for. | ||
| And whatever happens in the next few days, I'm going to keep pushing for reforms that make high-quality health care that's actually affordable a reality for every American. | ||
| Okay, so again, this is what Democrats actually want. | ||
| But in order to get there, they need a program that eventually becomes non-feasible and requires gigantic infusions. | ||
| They created Obamacare, and then they created gigantic subsidies, and then they had those subsidies set to expire. | ||
| And then when they expire, they blame the Republicans for it. | ||
| That is the plan. | ||
| It is a politically useful plan for them, for sure. | ||
| Right now, there is a stalemate in the Senate where Democrats refused to go along with the Republican plan, Republicans refused to go along with the Democratic plan. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, a Democratic effort to extend expiring health care subsidies drew some Republican votes, but failed on Thursday to advance in the Senate. | ||
| Meanwhile, a GOP approach also failed, leaving no clear path in Congress for aiding millions of Americans facing soaring Affordable Care Act insurance costs next year. | ||
| The Democratic proposal would have extended the enhanced COVID-era's ACA subsidies for three years. | ||
| That bill was backed by 51 senators, including several Republicans, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, with 48 opposed. | ||
| So a majority do support the extension of the health care subsidies, but that's short of the 60 votes needed to advance under the Senate's filibuster rules. | ||
| Republicans then put forward an alternative health care bill that would not extend the subsidies, but would instead offer federal funds to some households to put toward out-of-pocket insurance costs. | ||
| The Republican proposal failed with 51 in favor and 48 opposed. | ||
| Senator Ram Paul of Kentucky sided with Democrats in voting against the measure because, again, Senator Paul doesn't like any government spending. | ||
| The lack of progress means that open enrollment closes December 15th for plans starting on January 1st. | ||
| And so households are now being forced to sign up for coverage with sharply higher costs with no guarantee that Congress will act to restore subsidies and bring the price tag down. | ||
| This, of course, is what Democrats want. | ||
| Senator Majority Leader John Thune criticized the Democratic bill as a continuation of the status quo and an attempt to disguise the real impact of Obamacare's spiraling health care costs. | ||
| Thune said that after the vote, some Republicans want to talk with the Democrats, but we'll see if they have an audience. | ||
| Josh Halley said that he voted to advance both of them because he said, listen, anything that will bring down the costs is something that we should do, just electorally speaking. | ||
| He said, I want to see big changes to both of them, but my view is we've got to do something. | ||
| According to the White House, the president is working with his own health policy team as well as Republicans on Capitol Hill to find a solution. | ||
| Here was the White House press secretary explaining it yesterday. | ||
| He has made unprecedented progress towards lowering health care costs in this country and drug prices. | ||
| He's secured numerous most favored nation drug price deals with many more to come. | ||
| As you know, the One Bay Beautiful bill, the Working Family Tax Cut, significantly expanded access to health savings accounts for those on Obamacare. | ||
| Again, a Democrat written program and approved program, which has led to higher health care costs in this country. | ||
| So it goes back to the issue of affordability. | ||
| Democrats are now pretending they want a solution to this issue, but they created the problem. | ||
| The president and Republicans are currently coming up with creative solutions and ideas to lower health care costs for the American people. | ||
| Okay, so, yeah, again, she's not wrong about this, but if people don't feel the health care costs lowering, it's not really going to matter very much. | ||
| ABC's Mary Bruce pushed Caroline Levitt about all this. | ||
| And this is a clever trap for Democrats. | ||
| And it's why the Republican position initially with regard to all of these things is that you have to replace them. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| You have to bite the bullet and you have to replace them. | ||
| You can't just wait for Democrats to put you in the political vice that is expiring subsidies and then blaming it on you. | ||
| The president is prepared to take action on health care and he wants Republicans on the Hill to do the same. | ||
| As you have seen, Senate Republicans put forth their own legislation earlier this week. | ||
| As for the subsidies that are set to expire, I would like to remind you and everybody at home why this is on the brink of happening. | ||
| Democrats wrote Obamacare. | ||
| They passed it without a single Republican vote and then they ballooned it with these expensive COVID subsidies that completely distorted the health insurance market. | ||
| And then they doubled down, extending those subsidies and setting their own expiration date right now in 2025, which the administration is obviously well aware of. | ||
| And we are working, the president is working with his health care policy team here at the White House, as well as Republicans on Capitol Hill to find a solution. | ||
| Again, the reality here is that Republicans should come up with a plan just on a practical political level that extends some of the subsidies for a year or at most two years and then has a transitional plan away from the subsidies. | ||
| That includes more deregulation and more health insurance options. | ||
| That can include health savings accounts. | ||
| It doesn't have to be limited to health savings accounts. | ||
| There are many things that Avic Roy, for example, has discussed as a possibility in terms of lowering health insurance costs. | ||
| You need more competition. | ||
| You need more catastrophic health care plans that are available. | ||
| In many areas, there's only one plan available, and it's just through Obamacare because Obamacare made it very, very difficult to be essentially accredited to be part of Obamacare in the first place. | ||
| Democrats, of course, are enjoying this. | ||
| They create the crisis. | ||
| And now they're doing the meme. | ||
| They're doing the meme where the guy shoots the guy on the couch and then says, who would have done this? | ||
| Democrats created the problem, but apparently it's the Republicans' fault. | ||
| Here's Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader. | ||
| Republicans just blocked the Democrats' bill for a clean, simple extension of the ACA tax credits. | ||
| The last chance they had to ensure people's premiums do not skyrocket in the coming months. | ||
| Democrats did the work, but now Republicans chose the consequences. | ||
| Now Republicans have all but guaranteed that tens of millions of people will see their premiums double or triple or more next year. | ||
| Republicans now own America's health care crisis. | ||
| And not only that, according to Senator John Osoff in Georgia, he says that senators will now decide if people live or die. | ||
| By the way, this sort of language is not useful. | ||
| Bernie Sanders has been doing it for years. | ||
| The idea is that if you don't want his specific solution to American health care, that thousands will die. | ||
| Whenever you suggest that the political policies pursued by your opposition on matters of economics are death issues, like life and death issues, you're raising the stakes pretty dramatically. | ||
| And again, in the era where we talk about raising that temperature and the possibility of political violence, I just don't think this is useful or good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is life or death. | |
| People will die. | ||
| This is one of the most consequential votes this Senate will take all year. | ||
| By saying yay or nay to the clerk of the Senate later today, senators will decide whether people live or people die. | ||
| Senators will decide whether Georgians and folks across the country are financially ruined or have a shot. | ||
| Half a million Georgians, it's projected, will lose their coverage altogether. | ||
| Now, again, this is an issue that Osoff is speaking up about because he sees political advantage. | ||
| He is up for reelection in 2026 in Georgia, which is indeed a red state. | ||
| There are two Georgia Republicans who are seeking to run against him. | ||
| One of them is U.S. Representative Mike Collins. | ||
| The other is a former football coach named Derek Dooley. | ||
| So it'll be interesting to see what the polling looks like for Osoff. | ||
| That is the reason why he is jumping on this issue. | ||
| Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, he says that the reason that they are not supporting some sort of just increased subsidy is because the goal isn't to help out the 7% of Americans who are reliant on the subsidies. | ||
| It's to reduce healthcare costs across the board. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're working on a panic legislation that will reduce premiums for all Americans, not just 7% of them. | |
| And I've been talking to every one of these colleagues in the tough districts about that. | ||
| So stay tuned. | ||
| There's more to come. | ||
| Okay, but one of the realities, one of the hard realities of a legislature that is national in scope is that there are a lot of Republicans in purple districts who are going to have to go back and answer to their constituents and might lose their seats. | ||
| And the same thing is true in the Senate. | ||
| And we are seeing this across the country. | ||
| Presidents in their second term rarely have coattails for the rest of their party. | ||
| And so this is why one of the big controversies that emerged over the course of the last week was the question of redistricting, congressional redistricting in Indiana. | ||
| Alrighty, coming up, the Indiana GOP bucks President Trump. | ||
| What's going on there first? | ||
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| So in Indiana, there is, in fact, a Republican state legislature. | ||
| Nonetheless, Indiana rejected a plan to congressionally redistrict. | ||
| Right now, there are seven congressional districts in Indiana that are Republican and two that are Democrat. | ||
| President Trump wanted Indiana's state legislature to redistrict, thus creating nine seats for Republicans as opposed to seven. | ||
| Nonetheless, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Indiana Senate rejected a congressional redistricting plan in a rebuke to President Trump, who had a pressure campaign put on Republican lawmakers. | ||
| The state senate denied the new map by a vote of 31 to 19. | ||
| 21 senators from the Republican majority and all 10 Senate Democrats voted down the proposal. | ||
| Texas, of course, is going along with President Trump. | ||
| But Republican state Senator Greg Good, who voted against the new map, said, Friends, we're better than this. | ||
| Are we not? | ||
| Some Republican lawmakers against the redistricting reported swatting incidents at their home after they voiced opposition. | ||
| And why are they worried? | ||
| Well, if you're a Republican in a state legislature, you're not redistricting your own congressional district and the state legislature. | ||
| You're not redistricting your own district. | ||
| You're redistricting the federal district. | ||
| And so if the voters of Indiana feel like you're doing something unfair, you may lose your seat. | ||
| Indiana has historically been, it's a red, but it's kind of purpley state. | ||
| And so that is a concern for members of the Indiana state legislature. | ||
| This came, by the way, after Heritage Action wrote on X, quote, roads will not be paved. | ||
| Guard bases will close. | ||
| Major projects will stop. | ||
| These are the stakes, and every no vote will be to blame. | ||
| President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. | ||
| Now, again, it's unclear to me that that actually is something that President Trump threatened. | ||
| Threatening, by the way, to withdraw funding from a state for not engaging in the political act of redistricting in favor of the president's party is indeed pretty wild stuff. | ||
| It's one thing to pressure state legislatures to do things. | ||
| It's another to say that the citizens of that state should suffer from the withdrawal of benefits in cases of failure to do something as purely political as redistricting. | ||
| President Trump, of course, was duly angry. | ||
| He said, listen, we just lost two seats in Indiana. | ||
| But there are many countervailing factors here, including the fact that it turns out that state legislators actually have the interests of their own constituents they have to worry about. | ||
| Not all party issues are national. | ||
| Well, we won every other state. | ||
| That's the only state that's funny because I won Indiana all three times by a landslide, and I wasn't working on it very hard. | ||
| It would have been nice. | ||
| I think we would have picked up two seats if we did that. | ||
| Meanwhile, he vowed revenge on an Indiana Republican who helped to kill the gerrymandering bill. | ||
| I wasn't very much involved, but there's a man named Bray as a, I guess, head of the Senate. | ||
| Was that Bray Fitz? | ||
| Bray? | ||
| And I mean, I'm sure that whenever his primary is, it's, I think, in two years, but I'm sure he'll go down. | ||
| He'll go down. | ||
| I'll certainly support anybody that wants to go against it. | ||
| Now, again, the reason for this is because Indiana has always considered itself a sort of friendly state and suggested that they were not particularly interested in engaging in what is highly partisan activity. | ||
| They said that it would create chaos. | ||
| They cited huge expenses in ensuring voter registration systems would be updated. | ||
| And again, this is a mid-decade redistricting. | ||
| So while I would have voted, and well, I think Republicans should have voted for the redistricting, this is indeed a sort of bellwether for Republican support on the state legislative and on the federal legislative level for President Trump's agenda. | ||
| And it's why if the president wishes to be able to cram down his agenda, he's going to need to increase his popularity ratings. | ||
| Because if those coatels do not exist, you're not going to get legislators to vote for your more controversial agenda items. | ||
| Meanwhile, by the way, I will say that President Trump did do something that I think is really good yesterday if it's effective. | ||
| He signed an executive order to curtail state AI laws, according to the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| The order would allow the DOJ to punish states with rules deemed restrictive for AI in a move to bring the U.S. under one federal standard. | ||
| There have been over a thousand AI bills proposed at the state level. | ||
| Congressional Republicans had sought to pass a moratorium on state laws in both the tax bill that passed in July and in the defense bill that passed, but it was not included in the end. | ||
| And one of the goals here is to ensure that AI companies are not going to be regulated to death. | ||
| So, again, that is a good thing that President Trump is trying to do. | ||
| Whether it's going to hold up legally in court is another question. | ||
| Well, meanwhile, the president does have more successful parts of his administration, at least in terms of polling. | ||
| The most successful part continues to be his immigration enforcement regime. | ||
| Caroline Lovitt over at the White House, she pointed out yesterday that the apprehensions on the border are at historic lows. | ||
| And that, of course, is because the administration has made clear: if you show up, we're turning you away. | ||
| It turns out that all the Biden lies about how they needed additional legislation to shut down illegal immigration, that was not true. | ||
| Here's Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday. | ||
| At this point, in 10 months under President Trump's unmatched leadership, we've seen less apprehensions overall than we saw in just one month under Joe Biden. | ||
| Again, let me repeat: in 10 months under President Trump, we've seen less apprehensions at the southern border than we saw in one month under the previous president. | ||
| Okay, so she was right about all that. | ||
| Yesterday, it was kind of amazing how Democrats continue to take the wrong side of this issue. | ||
| So, yesterday, there's a pretty insane confrontation that happened between one Democrat from Rhode Island named Representative Seth Magazineer, cool name, who cited cases of veterans and military families facing removal or prolonged detention. | ||
| He asked Christy Noam about whether there were veterans and military families facing removal or prolonged detention, and Noam said no veterans had been deported. | ||
| Magziner then pulled up one veteran, Seijun Park, over Zoom. | ||
| Well, there's only one problem: that person was not deported. | ||
| In June, this person was a green card holder who had drug possession charges and failure to appear in court. | ||
| And he was issued a removal order because of the drug possession charges and failure to appear in court. | ||
| And so he ran away. | ||
| So, no, that's not actually a deportation. | ||
| That is a person who engaged in allegedly criminal conduct. | ||
| But Democrats continue to be clown themselves on this issue. | ||
| It really is kind of insane. | ||
| Here is Dan Goldman, representative from New York, going after Christy Noam over deporting asylum seekers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Immigrants with ongoing asylum applications are legally in this country. | |
| There are individuals in this country that have applications that they are legally here because it's a lawful pathway, right? | ||
| It's a lawful platform. | ||
| Okay, so if your department then deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law, correct? | ||
| Joe Biden left us with Joe Biden. | ||
| I'm asking you a specific question. | ||
| If your department deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| It was greatly violated when they allowed people to come up with asylum applications. | ||
| Why are you filibustering? | ||
| Why can't you answer the question? | ||
| It's a simple question. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And the answer to the question is that the entire definition of asylum was so broadened under Joe Biden that the idea that if you came in now and you're applying for asylum based on zero credible claim, that's the problem. | ||
| She, of course, agrees that asylum is a legal pathway to gain citizenship. | ||
| But the point is that when you broaden the claim for asylum itself, when you change the definition to include people who ought not have asylum, well, that violates the law as well. | ||
| That is a violation of the law. | ||
| Christy Noam did get into another tete-tete yesterday on the Hill with Benny Thompson. | ||
| This is pretty incredible. | ||
| The congressperson suggested that a shooting attack in Washington, D.C. against the National Guard, in which one person was killed and one severely wounded, was quote-unquote an unfortunate incident, and Christy Noam is having none of it. | ||
| Madam Secretary, you and the gentleman from CTNCTC reference the unfortunate accident that occurred with the National Guardsman being killed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You think that was an unfortunate accident? | |
| I mean, there's a terrible. | ||
| No, wait, look, I'll get it straight. | ||
| Then you can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He shot our National Guardsman in the head. | |
| Well, yeah, that'd be correct. | ||
| Man, oh, the beclowning. | ||
| Oh, the massive, massive beclowning. | ||
| My goodness. | ||
| Well, meanwhile, on foreign policy, things are getting spicy. | ||
| So the president of the United States has now authorized more seizures of tankers, apparently. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration's seizure of a tanker full of Venezuelan crude hits Nicolas Maduro much harder than airstrikes on alleged drug boats. | ||
| It raises an existential crisis for a regime that runs on oil revenue. | ||
| While the United States has accused Maduro of leading a drug trafficking cartel, oil money is far more important to the Venezuelan leader, his inner circle, and the country itself. | ||
| Crude sales have long represented more than 90% of Venezuela's export income. | ||
| You noted this yesterday. | ||
| And close Maduro allies have faced accusations of skimming from billions in additional oil revenues. | ||
| More tanker seizures or even the threat creates an escalating series of crises, forcing Venezuela to deeply discount its oil to its handful of buyers, including China, and spend more of its dwindling foreign reserves to stop spiraling inflation. | ||
| Apparently, the tanker that was seized was carrying roughly $80 million worth of oil. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Equivalent to 5% of what Venezuela spends monthly on imported goods, raising the prospects of shortages as well. | ||
| Because if they don't export the oil, then they don't have money to buy things. | ||
| U.S. officials said on Wednesday there would be more ship seizures. | ||
| President Trump has also been hitting Venezuela with sanctions. | ||
| Yesterday, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on three nephews of Nicolas Maduro, as well as a businessman close to his regime and six companies shipping its oil. | ||
| Scott Besson said in a written statement, Nicolas Maduro and his criminal associates in Venezuela are flooding the United States with drugs that are poisoning the American people. | ||
| Three of the people sanctioned have been on the U.S. radar. | ||
| Some of them are narcotics traffickers, allegedly. | ||
| Two were known as the Narco nephews after they were arrested in Haiti and convicted in the United States in 2016. | ||
| President Biden granted them clemency in October 2022 in a prisoner swap. | ||
| The third nephew is tied to the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, and was sanctioned by Treasury in 2017. | ||
| Again, Joe Biden removed him from the sanctions list. | ||
| And what a great president Joe Biden was. | ||
| My goodness. | ||
| There are going to be more sanctions where that came from as well. | ||
| So is the United States, by economic pressure, pushing for a coup in Venezuela? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I mean, I think pretty clearly the answer is yes. | ||
| Meanwhile, President Trump is touting that drug trafficking via Venezuela, drug trafficking by sea, is down almost 100%. | ||
| If you look at the drug traffic, drug traffic by sea is down 92%. | ||
| And nobody can figure out who the 8% is because I have no idea. | ||
| Anybody getting involved in that right now is not doing well. | ||
| And we'll start that on land, too. | ||
| I mean, that, of course, is exactly, exactly right. | ||
| Now, again, all the measures that he is currently using against Venezuela are measures that should also be used against our other geopolitical opponents that include China and Russia. | ||
| And herein lies the problem. | ||
| It is very difficult to suss out the foreign policy of the administration on sort of a broad level. | ||
| It seems that generally the administration does pursue a peace-through strength Reaganite foreign policy, wherein we deter our geopolitical opponents through military strength and economic measures, and we help out our friends in order to deter our political opponents. | ||
| That is the sort of peace-through-strength model. | ||
| However, there is indeed a branch inside the Trump administration, either freewheeling or under President Trump's auspices, unclear which, that seems to want to carve out spheres of influence for our geopolitical opponents. | ||
| That includes Russia, for example. | ||
| So, President Trump yesterday said that he's talking with China and Russia about denuclearization. | ||
| Now, again, that might be a tactic. | ||
| That absolutely could be a tactic. | ||
| President Reagan used to talk the same way about denuclearization. | ||
| He famously suggested that he wanted all the countries on earth to get rid of their nuclear weapons. | ||
| Of course, that never happened because it turns out that America's geopolitical opponents have no such interests. | ||
| Here's President Trump saying something similar. | ||
| One of the things I talked to China about is the denuclearization of weapons. | ||
| So we'd like to see if we could stop that. | ||
| I've spoken to, I'm talking about nuclear weapons. | ||
| I've spoken to China about that. | ||
| I've spoken to Russia about that. | ||
| And I think it would be something that we would want to do and they would like to do. | ||
| And I think Russia would like to do. | ||
| Okay, but the question is whether any of that is going to be real, because again, these countries have their own separate interests. | ||
| Whenever you talk to people who are isolationist on foreign policy or who seem to think that we can just cut an easy deal with Russia or China, whenever you are making a deal, there are two sides at the table. | ||
| Russia has demonstrated zero interest in integrating into the so-called family of nations, being friendly toward the United States, not pursuing its own geopolitical cause, which is the cause of a Russian empire. | ||
| Again, that is the way that Vladimir Putin views his own country, is that it ought to be and must be, in order to survive in the world, an imperial state. | ||
| Alexander Dugan, often known as Putin's brain, has talked openly about this for years and years and years. | ||
| And we've talked extensively on the show about that philosophy. | ||
| China itself believes that if it is not growing in geopolitical power and might, then it is losing and it is failing. | ||
| And so recognizing the separate and oppositional interests of places like Russia and China is important to understanding just how we should pursue action in these places. | ||
| This is why, for example, I think that it is wrongheaded to give any sort of technological leg up to the Chinese. | ||
| The move by the administration to allow the selling of NVIDIA chips to the Chinese seems to be to be a mistake. | ||
| And again, I've seen some credible arguments otherwise saying, well, you know, the chips that we're shipping them are so far behind that it doesn't really matter. | ||
| We're going to remain well ahead of them and then they won't build their own tech stack. | ||
| The notion that the Chinese are not attempting to steal IP and cheat and that somehow they're going to be deterred from their mission, which is to overcome the United States by dependence on H-200 chips from NVIDIA. | ||
| That seems wrong-headed to me. | ||
| David McCormick, the senator from Pennsylvania, he's saying something of the same thing here. | ||
| I'm concerned. | ||
| I'm not clear on why that is the right path for us. | ||
| I want to be convinced because I keep asking the question. | ||
| The argument is, as I understand it, and I think Jensen's done a remarkable job and I've talked to him about this a number of times. | ||
| The argument is that this will somehow slow China's capacity to develop its own capability by giving them the most advanced chips. | ||
| I don't think that's been the, I don't think that's been the experience. | ||
| Okay, so I agree with him, obviously. | ||
| When it comes to Russia and Ukraine, where the United States is putting heavy pressure on Ukraine, the Ukrainians keep coming to the table with more concessions for the United States. | ||
| Where are the concessions from the Russians? | ||
| Where? | ||
| This war has been going on for three years at this point. | ||
| We have yet to see any serious concessions made by the Russians at all, or even any sign that they wish to make any concessions at all. | ||
| According to Politico, Ukraine's latest peace plan proposes a demilitarized free economic zone in the Donbass region where American business interests could operate. | ||
| That's an attempt to bring President Trump on board. | ||
| President Trump is aware of the latest 20-point plan Ukraine sent to the White House on Wednesday. | ||
| Ukrainian President Zelensky also spoke to reporters about the proposal on Thursday, suggesting that control of the buffer zone in eastern Ukraine still needs to be worked out, but that under the new proposal, troops from both Russia and Ukraine would be barred. | ||
| That, of course, marked a compromise from the original 28-point peace plan authored by the United States with Russian input under which Russian troops would control the region. | ||
| Zelensky noted that Ukraine would only withdraw its forces after receiving meaningful security guarantees from allies against future aggression from Moscow. | ||
| And again, this is the biggest issue. | ||
| It remains the biggest issue. | ||
| If the United States keeps pushing Ukraine, keeps pushing and pushing and pushing Ukraine to make concessions. | ||
| Why would the Ukrainians believe that if they make the concessions, the United States will stand by their side if the Russians attack? | ||
| If the Russians decide to renew, what in the behavior of this administration makes the Ukrainians believe that the United States will rush in armed to the teeth to help them if the agreement is violated? | ||
| It doesn't feel like this administration would. | ||
| It feels like they're looking for a way out. | ||
| And that is something that Putin, I think, has honed in on. | ||
| Ursula von der Leyen of the EU is not somebody that I find politically palatable, but she is not wrong when she says, I think it's important that this peace agreement does not sow the seeds for the next conflict. | ||
| I mean, we've seen this in 2014. | ||
| We've seen that the peace agreement and the security guarantees were not holding, were not robust enough, that the peace agreement was only giving time for Russia to regroup, reorganize. | ||
| And then the next invasion came in 2022. | ||
| Security guarantees play an enormous role. | ||
| Now, this does raise the question of Europe, because, of course, the president is right that Europe needs to take the lead when it comes to defending Ukraine. | ||
| Ukraine is a part of Europe. | ||
| It's not an element of the United States geographically. | ||
| In order for that to happen, however, Europe is going to have to reshape itself in a far more beneficial direction. | ||
| And that is not relegated to Europe's take on immigration. | ||
| The Vice President of the United States, of course, has been highly critical of Europe for its open immigration policy, and he is totally right about that, 100% right. | ||
| If it were possible for him to be 150% right, statistically, he would be 150% right. | ||
| The European immigration policy has been a full-scale disaster. | ||
| But as the Wall Street Journal points out, there is another problem. | ||
| The problem is economic stagnation in the EU. | ||
| European voters have over and over and over again granted their governments vast powers for welfare state redistributionism, and it has hampered economic growth dramatically. | ||
| According to the OECD, government social spending as a share of GDP, the United States is pretty high at 19.8%, but in France, it is 31%. | ||
| In Germany, it's 28%. | ||
| In the UK, it's 23%. | ||
| Gigantic welfare states, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board points out, require large tax bills to fund them, which is why government revenues reached 47% of GDP in France, 41% of GDP in Germany, 43% in Italy. | ||
| That number is 27% in the United States, which is why we have a robust economy. | ||
| So that means that if the United States wishes for Europe to pursue better policy, that can't just be immigration policy or military spending. | ||
| It has to be robust economic policy that very few people in Europe are actually pushing for. | ||
| The far-right parties in Europe typically are kind of socialistic in their own economic autarkism. | ||
| And that's something the United States really should be pushing back against. | ||
| If Europe hopes to survive and thrive, it's going to, at some point, need to deregulate in massive ways. | ||
| It's going to need to take that welfare state and put it off to the side. | ||
| And instead of the right in the United States, trying to reject European immigration openness, well, embracing European welfare statism, we should be rejecting both of those things. | ||
| Obviously, Republicans are facing challenges across the country. | ||
| There's some early bellwethers for 2026 that don't look great. | ||
| One of those that earlier this week, the city of Miami, for the first time in three decades, voted openly for a Democrat joining us on the line to discuss is the mayor of Miami, who is a Republican, Francis Suarez. | ||
| Mayor Suarez, thanks so much for taking the time. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, good to be with you, Ben. | ||
| So obviously, Republicans just suffered an electoral defeat in Miami in the race to succeed you for the first time in three decades. | ||
| What do you think is happening? | ||
| Well, first, you have to demystify that headline a little bit, right? | ||
| As you know, we live in a world of sort of fake news. | ||
| And so you got to first parse that out. | ||
| It seems to come from this idea that the last Democrat elected was elected in 1985. | ||
| The problem with that math is that from 85 to 93, the mayor was an independent, right? | ||
| Not a Republican. | ||
| From 93 to 97, we had a Republican. | ||
| But then from 2001 to 2009, right in the middle of that, you had an independent Democrat, essentially a Democrat, because he was the guy who was a Democrat before he was mayor. | ||
| He was an independent for two terms. | ||
| And then he became the chair of the Democratic Party of Florida as the mayor. | ||
| So the guy was a Democrat, basically, right? | ||
| Masquerading as an independent for eight years. | ||
| So this idea that Miami now flipped after 30 years is a little bit of a misnomer. | ||
| And then you have to think the two Republicans, myself and my predecessor, my predecessor got elected by 75%. | ||
| I got elected by 80% and re-elected by 80%. | ||
| So, you know, I got re-elected by obviously a cross-section of people and parties. | ||
| So this was the first election that was partisan. | ||
| There's no doubt about that, right? | ||
| And the problem with it and the problem with a partisan race in Miami, if you're a Republican, is if you look at the party breakdown, Republicans are last out of the three major categories, right? | ||
| So you have Democrats are number one, MPAs are number two, and Republicans are number three. | ||
| It's not a huge margin, but it's a big enough market. | ||
| You know, it's significant enough that if you run a strictly partisan race, you're probably going to lose, right? | ||
| And that's essentially what happened. | ||
| And I think, you know, my viewpoint on it is if you're going to run a partisan race, you have to, you know, the military term is prep the battlefield, right? | ||
| You got to like have registration numbers that will support running a purely partisan race. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Number two, there is a disturbing trend in Miami and in America. | ||
| And I think this is part of what you want to talk about. | ||
| There's a Mamdanification of America. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| And we saw that in Miami in the primary, which was plus 14 for Democrats. | ||
| Again, plus 14 is not the differential in registration, which means they got MPAs, right? | ||
| But the plus 14 in that category of people that voted, they were plus six for Mamdani. | ||
| Let me repeat that. | ||
| In Miami, Mamdani was plus six, okay, among people that voted in the primary. | ||
| That is disturbing. | ||
| That is disturbing at a very visceral level for me as a conservative Republican and Cuban, right? | ||
| It's visceral for me as a leader of a city that welcomes the people of the Jewish faith and protects them, in my opinion, like no other city in the planet. | ||
| So it is extremely, extremely disturbing. | ||
| And I think it highlights a broader problem. | ||
| And the problem is that, you know, socialism is the easiest selling politics. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You just take advantage of discontent, right? | ||
| You sow discontent, even if you're succeeding, even if everybody's succeeding, right? | ||
| Miami has the lowest unemployment in America under my watch, the highest median wage growth in America. | ||
| We've moved companies that, you know, that managed $13 trillion in AUM to our ecosystem in the last few years, 500% increase in the venture capital pipeline. | ||
| I mean, all these KPIs that are successful, lowest taxes ever, highest bond rating, highest reserves in history, lowest homicide rate almost in our entire history. | ||
| Last year we had 27. | ||
| We started recording them in 1946. | ||
| We had 31. | ||
| In 1980, we had 220. | ||
| And this year we're at 25. | ||
| So incredibly safe, incredibly prosperous. | ||
| But of course, what happens? | ||
| Democrats are focusing on the negative. | ||
| So the question, I guess, is you were able to win with this huge majority. | ||
| Your predecessor was able to win with a huge majority. | ||
| What did Republicans do wrong that they weren't able to run a bipartisan race? | ||
| Because obviously Democrats have been moving further to the left, but that theoretically should open more room for Republicans to run in the center. | ||
| So what can Republicans do better as they look forward, particularly, as you mentioned, in areas that are kind of purplish? | ||
| Because you're right, Miami is not a heavy red area, traditionally speaking. | ||
| It would be kind of middle of the purple. | ||
| Well, I think you cannot run a strictly partisan race in a city like Miami, right? | ||
| And I think that's essentially what the candidate did. | ||
| He started getting major endorsements from Republican senators from Texas. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Ted Cruz was, you know, I don't have anything against Ted Cruz, but Ted Cruz is not a Miamian. | ||
| He's a Cuban senator from Texas. | ||
| And that kind of focus, his campaign was run by outsiders who obviously don't understand Miami. | ||
| I think if you really look at the phenomenon of Trump, it's kitchen table issues, right? | ||
| He was able to get working class people to vote Republican. | ||
| And when I ran for president, briefly, right, my focus was three things: get more Hispanics because Hispanics are trending more conservative. | ||
| Get more urban voters, right? | ||
| You don't have to win Philadelphia, but if you do 10 points better in Philadelphia, you win Pennsylvania, right? | ||
| And get young voters, which believe it or not, Biden had actually crushed Trump in young voters in the first go-around. | ||
| So, you know, I think that is something, you know, to get independence, you've got to focus on kitchen table issues like affordable housing, quality of life, low taxes, low crime, and a vision for the future. | ||
| I don't think the candidate, the Republican candidate, did any of those things. | ||
| He focused on one very, very minor thing, which by the way, it's very hard to do, which is removing property taxes for the homestead, which is something that DeSantis has been talking about. | ||
| He was DeSantis supported and DeSantis run in terms of his campaign team. | ||
| And that's a very narrow issue in terms of the affordability conversation, right? | ||
| That's just for homeowners who happen to have a homestead, right? | ||
| And not have to pay taxes, which by the way, is great. | ||
| I support it, obviously. | ||
| I would love to, as a homeowner, I would love to not have to pay taxes on my homestead, right? | ||
| But it's not going to solve the affordability issue. | ||
| And I'm not saying that the government has to solve it, but certainly what Democrats do better than Republicans is they talk about it more and they talk about it. | ||
| You know, I don't think that necessarily means that they have good ideas. | ||
| I actually think their ideas are pretty terrible. | ||
| But the focus is on it. | ||
| And listen, people want solutions. | ||
| So if someone's talking about something and focusing on something, they're probably going to gravitate to that, especially since socialism, as you know, promises things that not only don't deliver, they actually make you go backwards, but they sound good in rhetoric. | ||
| So, Mayor Suarez, one of the issues that Republicans have as an issue coming up is that while President Trump did really, really well with Hispanic voters in the last election cycle, the polls since the election seem to be trending the other way. | ||
| It seems like there's a significant drop-off in support among Hispanics for the Republican Party. | ||
| Why do you think that's happening? | ||
| I think immigration is a big issue, you know, and I think I'm interested to see where the president ultimately lands on this issue. | ||
| Obviously, we've been seeing a lot of stuff on the enforcement side. | ||
| And I think people generally are supportive of that, right? | ||
| Like in the sense that we don't want to have a porous border. | ||
| We don't want people who are here illegally in our country who are committing crimes. | ||
| We don't want them. | ||
| And then, and then there's everything else, right? | ||
| And I think there has to be a coherent conversation on this issue that's in the best interest of our country, right? | ||
| My parents came here legally from Cuba at 12 and 7, right? | ||
| A lot of Cubans had, I call it super status for many, many years with the wet foot, dry foot policy that was actually implemented by Clinton initially, where they got automatic asylum if they touch land in the United States. | ||
| So I think there has to be a broader conversation based on metrics that talk about what is best for the country. | ||
| And what are the metrics that I would talk about? | ||
| Unemployment, right? | ||
| What are the workers that we need in particular industries? | ||
| I mean, there's some industries that are going to propel the economy of the future. | ||
| We need to make sure that we're competitive when it comes to that. | ||
| We have a declining birth rate like a lot of major industrialized countries around the world. | ||
| And then we need to focus on, in my opinion, and I think this is part of the Venezuela policy, creating prosperity in our hemisphere, because that will de-power China, number one, but it will also create less of an incentive for people to leave their home country. | ||
| Most people don't want to leave. | ||
| I mean, if their home country wasn't broken, they probably wouldn't leave their home country to begin with. | ||
| So I think there's a piece to be done on that front. | ||
| Well, Mayor Francis Juarez of Miami, really appreciate the time and the insight. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Ben, anytime. | ||
| Alrighty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now. | ||
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|
unidentified
|
Oh, this is an illusion. | |
| An echo of a voice that has died. | ||
| And soon that echo will cease. | ||
| They say that Merlin is mad. | ||
| They say he was a king in Dovid. | ||
| The son of a princess of lost Atlantis. | ||
| They say the future and the past are known to him. | ||
| That the fire and the wind tell him their secrets. | ||
| That the magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command. | ||
| They say he slew hundreds. | ||
| Hundreds, do you hear? | ||
| That the world burned and trembled at his wrath. | ||
| The Merlin died long before you and I were born. | ||
| Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living. | ||
| Vortigen is gone. | ||
| Rome is gone. | ||
| The Saxon is here. | ||
| Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty. | ||
| And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne. | ||
| And he will have it. | ||
| If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope. | ||
| A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand. | ||
| A high king who would be the wonder of the world. | ||
| You to a future of peace. | ||
| There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust. | ||
| Men of the island of the mighty, you stand together. | ||
| You stand as Britons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You stand as one. | |
| Great darkness is falling upon this land. | ||
| These brothers are our only hope to stand against it. | ||
| Not our only hope. | ||
| They say Merlin slew 70 men with his own hands. | ||
| I could say he slew 500. | ||
| No man is capable of such a thing. |